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Spring

2021

Plastic Milk Bags and the Abandonment of a Hungarian Wood Pasture

Published
2021-01-14

Abstract

From the middle of the twentieth century, land-use abandonment is one of the most influential factors of the European cultural landscape. Our aim was to discover the history of an abandoned wood pasture in Hungary in Central-Eastern Europe. “Plastic bagged milk” was the turning point. At the end of the 1980s, people began moving to the city from the village of Pusztakovácsi. The wood pasture underwent spontaneous shrub growth and afforestation. Most of the people in the village no longer intended to keep livestock, due to changing opportunities and the lack of communal livestock management.